Parents Beware: Playing Video Games and Watching Movies May Help with Learning Music!

I fondly remember those days gone by in high school when my teachers warned me that my brain would turn into mush and become an amorphous mass of uselessness if I watched too much TV or played too many videogames. I guess throughout history this theme has been repeated over and over again; Parents of the 60’s generation thought that listening to the Beatles was the equivalent of worshipping Lucifer. Listening to the scandalous Rolling Stones Lyrics “Let’s Spend the Night

Together” was way too much to handle and had to be edited to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together” on the Ed Sullivan Show. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to preserve some semblance of cultural identity but sometimes things go too far! Let’s not forget that according to these conventional beliefs I was destined to become a serial killer because I loved watching Friday the 13th movies and the Toxic Avenger Trilogy. I’ve also spent many an hour blowing up people, endangered wildlife and rare vegetation in shoot-em-up video games!

Note that the above listing was to help illustrate an upcoming point; In addition to the filth above, which I have somewhat outgrown but not completely, please note that I also love many “normal” movies like the Ten Commandments, Rocky, Willy Wonka, Das Boot and One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest. I’m not completely hopeless!

If you made it this far into the article let us proceed. I was looking through the Berklee School of Music’s course catalog and I noticed a course called Film Scoring 101. I quickly glanced through the syllabus to see what it was all about. There were segments called Setting Up and Shooting a Scene, Scene Comparison with and Without Music, Analysis of a Scene Structure etc.

I didn’t see anything, however, about writing out a storyboard, which is something that immediately came to mind (and may be in the course, I’m not sure, I haven’t taken it). I learned about storyboards when I was watching one of those satanic DVD’s for the movie the Sixth Sense with Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment. Basically before a script is fully realized (perhaps the story is written, but the moods or specifics of the actions haven’t been set in stone yet) a series of cartoon panel-style artist renderings of the scenes are drawn and used as an aid to complete the screenplay. According to Wikipedia, “The storyboarding process, in the form it is known today, was developed at the Walt Disney studio during the early 1930’s”.

I figured I’d give it a shot and did a mental storyboard. I wrote a solo guitar song called The Drifter in which I had a story of a homeless man vaguely worked out in my head. I was picturing a story board. You may download a pdf of this tune for free in the music and songs area. I will refer to measures from it in this article.

For measures 1 through 13, I was envisioning this Drifter doing some of his daily routine which may be fairly pleasant for him. Perhaps he has a daily habit of sitting on a bench and watching the swans at the pond up the street, or feeding the ducks. Then in measure 14 the songs begins to get a bit playful with the articulation of the hammer-ons and pull-offs that make up the melody. Maybe the drifter was remembering his first kiss in high school and the warm memories triggered a response in his brain and he decides to laugh a bit or skip about merrily down the road, hence the notes of a C-chord using variations of standard Travis picking, similar in style to Leo Kottke’s the Fisherman or Mark Hanson’s Over and Out Rag from his book the Art of Contemporary Travis Picking, from which much of the style of this piece is derived. By the way, the technique to play the C-chord variation with the left hand, where you lift and lower the appropriate finger but still use the notes of the chord or associated scale, is called block chord melody playing.

Oh no! In measure 21 this drifter fellow, who was skipping merrily, enters a dark alley and the song goes to an Am chord, giving it a more sinister feel. In measure 23 I envision him stumbling upon a gang and being attacked. Maybe he’s knocked out for several hours and then wakes up and it all starts over again after measure 35 when you go back to the beginning of the song (Da Capo) and finish up at the Coda when you get to measure 13 again and go to measure 36 from there.

I am currently writing two new pieces in which I will try this technique and hopefully be able to add a new section to this article. The first song is called The King’s Requiem in which I use an idea I learned watching the movie (oh no!) Amadeus, which is about the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. From what I understand the flick takes major liberties as far as historical and factual content is concerned, but contains some of the best music that is possible to hear! Anyways, according to the movie, Mozart was commissioned to write a requiem mass, which is a glorified way of saying funeral music. He never finished it because of the Typhoid fever he fell victim to, but what Mozart did complete always fascinated me. The movie implied that the many demons that Mozart faced killed him, as did writing this final piece and I’m inclined to believe it because I don’t understand how such a piece could have been possible unless the author felt he had one foot in hell already.

Anyways, I don’t know how this piece will turn out when and if it’s finally finished but I hope I can share it soon!